Authors: A.E. Marling
19
The Paragon
The jagged edge of the obsidian knife rested on Tethiel’s throat, above his salt-crusted collar. Emesea said, “The Obsidian Jaguar would love to feast on his liver.”
Sunlight streamed into Hiresha’s eyes, from the blue of the sky and the patches of glare wobbling at the crest of each wave. Her first words of the day came out as an unheard murmur, but she shook her head and gestured for Emesea to put down her knife.
“He’s the Lord of the Feast.” Emesea’s blade traced the embroidered nightshade blossoms on his vest. Two buttons were missing. “Feasters murder with magic, and the bloodless deaths dishonor the gods. Each time this man kills, the sun gets closer to snuffing out.”
“Tethiel controls them,” Hiresha said. “He forces restraint on other Feasters. They don’t break into homes to kill the sleeping because of him.”
Tethiel’s eyes were closed. His pallor would have looked unhealthy on a skeleton, and his cheek twitched in his sleep. Hiresha knew all too well that his magic wracked his dreams with nightmares. She also suspected that to save them last night he had drained himself with his castings.
“He’s a good man,” Hiresha said, “though he hides it well.”
The obsidian weapon played over the right side of his abdomen, above his liver, Hiresha realized. The enchantress considered if she should try to seize Emesea’s wrist.
Emesea said, “Of all the snakes, it’s the loyal family pet that’ll bite you.”
To be fair, I have my doubts about him as well.
“I don’t accept that the sun is in mortal danger on his account. Even he isn’t so offensive.”
The black razor nudged Tethiel’s chin to the side. His was a face that belonged on a statue, where an artisan could display his noble bearing and leave out his haggard lines and his stigma. A triangle was tattooed on his brow, its edges rough as if tiny arms of ink reached from the design.
“He’s a handsome old fox, isn’t he?” Emesea said. “Even without his face painted with magic. But if a foe offers you his belly it’s an insult not to open it.”
“I’ll thank you to put away your knife.” Hiresha felt a whirling tension. The day’s brightness seemed to pulse with the thud of her heart.
“The gods want him dead.” Emesea tucked the knife into her belt. “But they’ll want you alive more. Can't make an enemy of you.”
Hiresha crossed her hands over her chest, surprised at the sharp coolness of her relief.
“When you change your mind about him, I’ll be ready with a blade,” Emesea said. “If it’s not too late.”
She reached out to lines dangling from the rigging. Small red fish hung gutted and dripping blood into the sea.
Tethiel’s eyes popped open. He winked at Hiresha. “Thank you, my heart. I promise not to think less of you for recommending me.”
“Were you awake all that time?” Hiresha asked.
“What was I to do? Plead? The best arguments I can make in my defense can only be voiced by others.”
“A stowaway Feaster should not have counted on mercy. I don’t know why I spoke for you,” Hiresha lied.
Even if Tethiel had not saved her life again last night, she could never imagine the Lands of Loam without him.
Whoever succeeds him as Lord of the Feast may incite slaughter through the cities.
“A stowaway? No, I was kidnapped.” He swayed, seemingly unable to find his balance in the rocking of the boat. His rolling eyes focused for a moment on a clump of blue cloth. “There, I brought your dress. You dropped it near the city wall, and when this hero visited your boat to return it, he was pushed out to sea.”
“Oh, please,” Hiresha said.
Emesea had untied a fish. She placed it on a ballast stone, and the fish sizzled in the day’s heat.
Tethiel glanced away from the cooking flesh. Muscles in his throat worked as if suppressing nausea. “I wouldn’t have revealed myself, if you’d returned to land in a few hours like you’d said, my heart. If I hadn’t been needed.”
“So you almost nearly honored my request?” The enchantress observed sweat on his brow and how his hands clenched his belly. “Perhaps this sickness at sea is the closest you can come to guilt. You told me nothing was worse than forcing help on another.”
“I’m surprised you think I’d follow my own advice. I try to be a hypocrite at all times. It's the only way I can be consistent.” His cheeks bulged, and his eyes pinched closed. “How embarrassing. I fear I’ll have to be human.”
He leaned over the side, tilting the entire boat. He made a retching sound. Hiresha saw saliva trailing from his lips before she turned away.
The enchantress moved along the plank seat to balance his weight. She looked over the prow then squinted up to the sun.
It’s not quite noon, so we must be traveling northwest.
The direction would lead them to the desert coast. Hiresha could see no sign of land, only the washed-out colors of essence tempests on the horizon.
Emesea pointed. Her bare skin shone like mahogany. “We have a clear shot between those storms. They should be there and there in another hour.”
In the daytime, the dream storms looked like tinted mirages.
“I’ve yet to see a typical storm on this sea,” the enchantress said. “Which variety would pose a greater danger to our boat? Thunderstorm or essence tempest?”
“We might get under before rain and lightning breaks. But you’d never slip through a dream storm unchanged.”
“‘Unchanged?’”
“There’s power in the sea. It’s in the air. In the fish, too, and it won’t do an enchantress any good. That’s why I brought some almonds to eat and dried fruit.”
Emesea opened an oiled pouch and handed Hiresha the food. The enchantress’s stomach felt tense, but she nibbled on the leathery brown of a dried apricot. Once it had softened enough in her mouth, its sweetness bloomed into springtime flavors that stung with their potency. Hiresha found herself munching on the rest of the food.
“I had more,” Emesea said. “But it fell out when the boat flipped.”
The enchantress asked, “Our water?”
Emesea lifted a single waterskin. It sloshed from side to side.
Chunks of almonds scraped the enchantress’s throat when she swallowed. “Essence tempests are beginning to sound appealing.”
Emesea yawned with one arm outstretched, her fingers making claws. “Take the oars.”
The bare-chested woman pulled out a red dress from a sack, not to wear, but to spread over the netting and curl up in. She closed her eyes. If she slept then it was the least restful nap Hiresha had ever seen. Emesea tossed every few seconds, reaching out each time to touch the heft of her sword.
The skin around her ankles was puffy and all the colors of a swamp. A tentacle had gripped her there, and Hiresha could feel her own bruises beneath her dress as startling spots of tenderness.
The Murderfish hardly has a gentle touch.
The enchantress tested her blisters against the oars. She did her best to avert her eyes from Tethiel, who was cradling his head over the sea. She was sorry to see him in such a state of misery. But not too sorry.
In truth, she feared that some creature would leap out of the waters to bite off his head.
He should never have risked himself coming out to sea. Too much of import rests on his shoulders.
The enchantress kept watch on the waters. Green fish with brown stripes swam beneath the boat in pairs. Each one in the couple mirrored the other, identical in their size and fin movements. Hiresha could not tell if her sleepiness or the water surface was to blame, but neither fish in the pairing looked completely there.
Out of focus, somehow.
She asked, “They seem to flicker, do they not?”
Tethiel did not answer. He had rested his head against the mast and was taking long breaths.
An eel shot by and chomped one of the paired brown-stripes. It vanished, and the remaining member of the couple appeared more solid as it dashed away. In another second, the fish had split, appearing in two places again. Hiresha watched the same eel snap after more of the brown-stripes. Each time, one half of the pair escaped then renewed the other.
An adaptation of illusion,
Hiresha wondered,
or something more complex?
Hiresha had never studied an animal with its own magic before, and she was sorry to sail away. Her eyes squinted for a last look.
The eel had corralled three pairs of the brown-stripes together. The water flashed, and tendrils of energy whipped backward into the eel. The surrounded fish floated stunned in the water, and now there were only three single fish. The eel gobbled them all down.
She worried the Murderfish could eat her and the other two people in the boat with similar ease. The enchantress would not go so far as to regret her choice of going to sea, but the need to return to shore burned in her like a swallowed oil lamp.
The more she gazed at the storms in front of them, the more she disliked their odds. The essence tempests ebbed and flowed across the sky, their borders hard to judge in daylight. They seemed to be closing together, with no other route toward land in sight.
Tethiel dabbed the corner of his mouth with the back of his glove. “We must name this noble ship.”
“Must we?”
Hiresha frowned at the boat. She had studied ship design, and the light of day had not improved her confidence in this vessel. At best, it looked like a collection of leaks. Scarcely larger than a rowboat, it lacked a rudder. It was a puzzle of mismatched woods, some white and spongy, others darker and rough. Knotholes wept sea water like ulcers. As far as Hiresha could tell, the boat was only held together with a few wooden pegs and bravado.
The enchantress asked, “Shall we call it the Flotsam?”
By the time they settled on “
The Paragon
,” Emesea had snorted awake. She turned the fish baking on the rock. One side had burned.
“I assume,” Hiresha said, “that
The Paragon
’s sail is made of only the finest of rags.”
The boat’s sail was not a sheet but a patchwork of fabric that may once have been dyed blue. The hues now ranged from stained to sun-bleached.
Emesea nodded upward. “They’re old priest robes stitched together.”
“For favor from the gods,” Tethiel said.
“The wrong ones.” Emesea lifted half the cooked fish to her mouth. Bones crunched between her teeth, and a red scale stuck to her lip. “True gods only grant favors through blood.”
Tethiel said, “A sense of style is to be divinely favored.”
Emesea untied a gutted fish from the rigging and tossed it to Tethiel. It bounced off his chest.
“That fish is fine to eat raw,” she said.
“Apart from the taste, I’m sure.” He poked at the fish. It rolled and gazed at him with a golden, dead eye. Tethiel’s chest lurched as he nibbled its tail end. “I’m not certain I should eat seafood on an empty stomach.”
Emesea pulled on ropes to raise the sail. “Wouldn’t have guessed a Feaster to have such a baby belly.”
“The wild magic in sea fish disagrees with us. And it isn’t wise to start arguments with one’s dinner. In matters of digestion, if you win against the odds, you lose.”
The most Hiresha could contribute to the conversation was to keep her eyes open. Or at least not entirely closed.
Beside Tethiel and Emesea, Hiresha felt dull and useless.
Without gems I’m little better than a purple stocking.
She resolved to do what she could. She filled a waterskin from the sea. Tucking it under an arm, she settled down in the bilge to sleep.
In the dream laboratory, a mirror showed a variety of bird she had glimpsed for the first time that day. An ibis skimmed over waves, its wings sweeps of red except for one black feather at either end. The wing tips touched on one beat, and the air rippled ahead of the ibis. A fish was levitated out of the water and skewered by a sickle beak.
Intuition spun about on the tips of her toes, her arms held out to the mirrors. “All the animals here have magic.”
“And not all are determined to eat me, which is some small reassurance,” Hiresha said.
Intuition hugged herself, gazing at a mirror colored by tempests. “So much strangeness above, the sea below, and us caught between.”
“Going backward would be less than productive.” Hiresha’s magic pulled the salt from her dress and hair. “To the west would mean a longer voyage.”
The enchantress Attracted a sapphire jar from a shelf. Its crystalline lid opened at the same moment the cork popped from the waterskin. Liquid snaked out and into the jar, and light pulsed through it, purifying the liquid. Salt fell as a crystalline rain into Hiresha’s palm.
She awoke with a waterskin full of clean water and a handful of salt. Wind tore the powder from her fingers in a white trail. The boat tipped forward, mast creaking, sail ripping along one seam.
“What is this?” Hiresha glanced up, but the cloud above them was an innocent white. “Are these storm gales?”
Emesea sprang from one side of the boat to the other, pulling on four ropes at once to raise the sail. “Ha, ha! I’ve only seen this once before.”